Apollo Magazine, The many lives of a collector

By Rose Aidin

 

When lawyer Stuart Evans offered to create collections of contemporary British art for his firm, Simmons & Simmons, he unlocked a passion for collecting that has led to an exhibition opening in York this month, as Rose Aidin discovers. Photographs by Derry Moore.

 

'As a lawyer I always had more than one life,' explains Stuart Evans. In fact, he's had several. Evans combines being a partner in the City of London law firm Simmons & Simmons with curating its collection of contemporary art. He has also built two art collections of his own, follows Arsenal football team around the world and is a lay preacher at his London parish church. For several years he was chairman of the Tate's Patrons of New Art and in 2001 served on the Turner Prize jury. How does he manage it? 'Well, they say that if you want some-thing done, ask a busy person.'

Shortly after being made a partner at Simmons & Simmons in 1981, in his early 30s, Evans 'made a corporate proposal to my partners to differentiate ourselves as a law firm by buying contemporary art. I became a committee of one, and we built the collection in my spare time. Contemporary art is now an important part of the firm's public-relations profile, with well-subscribed tours for clients, staff and the public. Then, however, the idea raised a few eyebrows. 'After about a year, a round robin came round from a junior partner asking everyone what they thought,' recalls Evans, 'and I think I just scraped through. But three or four years later it was clear that what we were doing made eminent sense.'

 

Evans started by buying small works by modern British artists such as David Bomberg and prints by established contemporary British and American artists, including Howard Hodgkin and Roy Lichtenstein. Then, in the early 1990s, a new suite of conference rooms at the firm's London offices gave him the opportunity he had been waiting for. He started forming a new collection, 'Made in London', of works by the young artists he had been seeing in various venues in and around the city. They included Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Gary Hume, Gillian Wearing, Mark Wallinger - the core 'Young British Artists'.

 

'My colleagues started off thinking it was all very odd because no one else had a contemporary art collection, we were the first. But as it grew in the '90s, we had a repeat of what had happened in the '60s. Then you'd pick up the Standard and see George Best, Jean Shrimpton and David Hockney. Now it was Kate Moss, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. It was in your face, my colleagues would see it and think, "We've got one of those". It enabled a participation that was not easily possible before, when contemporary art was a rather recherché thing.'

 

Evans relishes his personal involvement with artists and, from the first, he and his firm were involved in the intricacies of the young artists' careers. 'I worked with Damien [Hirst] on his very first show in premises next to Philips the auctioneer in Woodstock Street in 1991', Evans recalls. 'We did a short agreement that gave him use of the premises for the period of the exhibition. It was in a shop where butterflies were flying and dying all around you: that was In and Out of Love. We did some other legal work for artists who needed it, so when Tracey Emin, Abigail Lane, Gary Hume, Michael Craig-Martin or Chris Ofili were moving studio, for example, we got involved in bits of real-estate work. And in those days they would give us a small piece in exchange. The collection grew and developed a particular flavour through that close relationship with the artists.' Evans has built several further collections for the firm, with the aim of supporting young artists by buying works early in their careers; he currently has an annual budget of £25,000.

Just as Simmons & Simmons has become more prominent in its involvement with the art world - adviser to the Tate on the structuring and financing of Tate Modern and a sponsor of Frieze art fair for example - the stature of the artists within their collection has increased. In 2000, Simmons advised Damien Hirst on the settlement of a legal dispute with Humbrol, the toy manufacturers, over the intellectual property rights to Hymn, a 20-foot, six-ton bronze sculpture inspired by a child's educational toy. More recently, the sale of one work from the collection, a 1991 Peter Doig painting entitled Iron Hill, covered the entire cost of the Simmons collection. 'We sold the Doig in 2005 for 70 times what we paid for it', explains Evans. 'I recommended to the board that we accept the offer because the offices are not museum conditions: you would feel pretty silly if a few weeks later someone put their head through it.'

 

Doig represents one of Evans's major regrets. 'I paid under £7,000 back in 1994. I remember not long afterwards people were paying £25,000 and I was saying "if only you'd known", but it never occurred to me to buy a second Peter Doig for £25,000. So how stupid is that if you're working with the benefit of hindsight and the desire for financial gain? But financial gain has not been the imperative.'

 

Evans was collecting for himself as he was building the Simmons collection. 'I don't think there's ever been a conflict, I always used to say "I'm on a Simmons buying trip today". Occasionally I would buy two, one for Simmons, one for myself. Both are the same kind of art and artists.' Evans prefers not to discuss his personal collection in detail. He has not sold any of his collection, but instead has moved house in order to accommodate its expansion. 'The best thing about collecting art all these years is living with it, it is very life enhancing. I think the relationship between pieces and the ways they bounce off each other is exciting, and changing that from time to time is very rewarding. I am quite evangelical about collecting art because it can broaden your horizons in many ways. And it is still relatively affordable, you still can buy fabulous things. If you want to concentrate on drawing, for example, you can buy fabulous drawings for under £2,000, or even $2,000, that could go straight into museums.'

 

Evans grew up in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. His mother was a teacher and his father worked in the jewellery business. 'When I was a schoolboy I used to go to the Laing Art Gallery and they had a cycle of contemporary art exhibitions. I remember seeing the work of Terry Frost and Dick Smith and finding that very exciting. It was the early '60s and I realised that artists see the world in very different and interesting ways.' Evans won a sixth-form art prize and founded an art club that met at the flat of the school's art teacher, William Feaver, later to be famous as a curator and the art critic of the Observer.

 

Evans did not consider taking art A-level or making a career in art. Instead he went to the University of Leeds to study law, explaining, 'I always found law an interesting career because it is about taking things apart and putting them back together, or analysing what the essential ingredients are and projecting forward from that.' At the age of 18, at university, Evans met his wife, Margaret. A few years earlier, he had a conversion experience in the Baptist church that he attended every Sunday. Margaret is a Church of England minister, so art, religion and the law have been intrinsic components of Evans's entire adult life.

 

Now, in his early 60s, Evans is scaling down his corporate law practice to 20 hours a week. He recently formed a working partnership with one of his three children, John, who is 31 and a property developer, and four other investors, to make a new collection, the Lodeveans Collection, named after the Evans' holiday home in Lodeve, Languedoc. A lending collection to be used as a public resource, it will ultimately be sold as an entirety to a museum or similar institution. In 18 months, Evans father and son, acting on behalf of the partnership, have spent £1m and plan to spend another over the next year-and-a-half. 'I've never collected with a view to making money, and at Simmons I had a very limited budget for work by young artists, so this has given me a different discipline', says Evans. 'I am spending not just family money but the money of people who are old friends. So I'm buying art by artists who I think are fabulous but are undervalued, people like Michael Landy or Alan Davie, and also, where I have the opportunity and at a good price, work by artists who are seen as superstars, like Jake and Dinos Chapman.'

 

Part of the collection was shown at the Hospital in Covent Garden last summer. 'It was the first time I'd ever remotely done anything like that and I was a bit peeved by one of the reviews. Then I realised I'm putting my head above the parapet and people are free to say what they like. I continue to want to do it - the idea of doing shows, which I've never done before, is very exciting.' More of the collection goes on show at York Art Gallery this month as 'Passed as Present', pairing Old Master paintings and works on paper from York with art from the Lodeveans collection.

 

'I can't see myself stopping', admits Evans. 'When we see ourselves in advance of realising this collection, we'll start another…I've not got to the bottom of why I do it, but I think because it doesn't have edges, it's infinitely beguiling and you never know exactly what you are doing. I don't buy things because I like them but because they provoke me. So in a sense I think you collect yourself in that, if you have questions that you are dwelling on, then you are attracted to the art that addresses them, and so in turn, in your collection, you see a story of part of your life.'

Apollo Magazine, The many lives of a collector